Know Thy Audience: How to Segment and Target for Business Results

For advertisers looking to use their ad budget as effectively as possible (so… pretty much everyone), identifying the best message to send to the right person at the right time is key. So how do we do that? Determining a solid strategy and the best tactics come down to really knowing your audience and defining a laser-focused goal for your campaign. After all, if you don’t know your audience, how are you supposed to communicate with them?

The growth of data collection tools and data management platforms has allowed for the development of highly-sophisticated approaches to media buying. We’re now able to target potential customers anywhere along the purchase journey and ensure the right message is reaching them at the right time—AKA, when they’re most likely to convert.

Audience targeting has been around for a while, but in recent years and even months, it has gotten better, stronger, and more accurate— giving us the ability to get as granular as we need to in order to reach unique audiences. Audience targeting has also been provided newer media buying possibilities across all platforms, including social channels, ad servers, search channels, and content marketing.

As campaigns roll out and data starts rolling in, segmenting those audiences into higher vs. lower converters enables marketers to build even more targeted campaigns by adjusting tactics and reallocating dollars to reach goals more efficiently and effectively. That means accurate audience targeting has the potential to turn all those casual browsers into active buyers.

Working from the information you already have, here are three things to consider as you identify, segment and target your audience:

1. Understand who you’re dealing with

What do you know about the target audience? Can you call out their pain points, what motivates them, and why they want or need what you have to offer? You can start with what you think you know (and you might be right about a lot of it) but to really understand your audience you will need to analyse the information you have in your CRM and any other analytics. Examine the actions of your best or ideal customers and start building on that.

2. Think like a customer

It’s tempting to set up a remarketing campaign addressing a specific scenario, such as re-engaging with cart abandoners or cross-selling products and services. This strategy will work, but it’s not the most effective approach. What you’re doing here is building a solution for one of your problems instead of looking at it from a customer-centric perspective. Build your campaigns around you customers’ pain points and you will be more successful at showcasing your ability to solve them.

3. Learn from your campaign

Once you get going, you can build on your strengths—segmenting your audience and fine-tuning campaigns. You can consider segmenting based on the following questions to help locate potential high-converters and ensure you’re working with viable target audiences:

Developing and answering questions like these leads to the final stage of owning and executing an audience targeting campaign that can generate concrete sales results. At DAC, we’ve seen sales results improve by 25% in a brief period to long-lasting results that have impacted a sales boost up to 45% for many of our clients. The industry is just starting to realise the potential of audience targeting that will only continue to evolve and improve. By getting into the weeds of your audience data, you’ll begin to understand your audience as it evolves and go on to develop digital marketing strategies that meet them where they are with the right message at the right time.

Michael Jurik is the Display Media Director at DAC. For more insights on how to leverage your target audience, please contact DAC!